Constantly changing passwords

I know it’s supposed to be best practice to force users to change their passwords regularly, but how are we supposed to remember them? I wonder whether anyone has done any research into passwords becoming lower quality as people are asked to change them. It just becomes increasingly difficult to think up memorable things that are not obvious, or look for ways of fooling the computer into letting you have a similar password every month.

Gaming on the move

We’re taking a 4.5 hour train ride to Leeds at the weekend, and then even longer on the way home, so I am hoping to entertain myself using a Windows 2000 laptop with no CD drive. The options I’m thinking of are:

  • Pingus
  • Prince of Persia on WinUAE
  • Continuing work on my secret Track and Field game by porting the UI stuff to Windows.
  • Booting some kind of Linux off my iRiver. Not at all sure this is possible.

The easy way would have been to run Games Knoppix, but there’s no CD drive. Gutted.

Nearing a new release

FreeGuide is hopefully nearing a new release. Alex has been working on the plugins system, and hopefully I will be able to test it this week. If it works ok, we’ll release it as unstable, and then with a few bug fixes we should be able to make the next release stable. Alex has refactored the code so that the main program is just another plugin. This is pretty cool as it means we can upgrade everything without restarting the program (hopefully, although in practice we think we may hit problems with resources not being freed). We are currently discussing exactly who should be able to upgrade what plugin when. I am keen that users be able to get a new listings grabber as soon as they need one without needing their admin to do it for them. On the other hand, probably only the admin should be able to upgrade the main app. The way jEdit does these things seems to work pretty well.

DIYPlanet

When I wrote DIYBlog it occurred to me that what I was writing would translate into a blog aggregator pretty easily, and so I’m working on making that so. I’d like to start a little community of Java developers who are working on small free and open source software Java programs, so we can start to communicate through our blogs and help each other out with thorny issues e.g. how to get our programs working with an all free software systems (more on that later).

For the moment I’m working on aggregating my own favourite feeds, which you can see here: Planet Andy. All this is/will be running on pure FTP web space, with a little cron job running on my own machine to keep it updated. Of course, that does mean it only works when my machine is turned on…